Recommended Reading

These are some books and online articles I recommend for those learning Drupal:

General theory

To get the most out of Drupal, you need to work with it and it's content-centric, modular approach. If you approach creating Drupal sites the same way you approached creating traditional, webpage-centric sites, you'll spend a lot of time fighting Drupal and won't, in the end, get many of the advantages that were the reasons you chose to use Drupal in the first place.

To become more familiar with "The Drupal Way" and the Drupal development eco-system, I recommend these articles:

Practical specifics

Drupal 7 and Drupal 6

Drupal 7

This is a good introduction to the basics of Drupal 7, with a step-by-step approach to explanations, which is how I tend to write my own How Tos. This is a more recent Drupal 7 book than Beginning Drupal (below), published a few years after the release of Drupal 7, so there is a better match between images/descriptions and current versions of Drupal 7. I now use this book when teaching introductory workshops.

This book is a good introduction to the basics of Drupal 7, presented much like a textbook with information and exercises. Note that it was written before Drupal 7 was officially launched, so some of the images and descriptions do not always exactly match what you will see, but the basic ideas and concepts are are the same and the specifics can be worked out from the information given. I used to use this book when teaching intorductory workshops.

This is a massive book covering a wide variety of Drupal topics, most of them written by the foremost Drupal expert(s) in that topic. It's somewhat daunting for the beginner, but once you have the basics, this is the go to reference.

This is a great little book for learning Drupal Commerce. It can be used with a Commerce Kickstart 2 installation or by installing Drupal Commerce modules to an existing Drupal 7 site. I use this book when I'm teaching Drupal Commerce workshops.

Drupal 6

Unfortunately, I haven't found a book for Drupal 6 like Drupal 7 Explained or Beginning Drupal for Drupal 7. There are some good references for more advanced topics, though, including:

Most Drupal sites use custom fields and views. In Drupal 6, these are provided by the contributed modules CCK (Content Construction Kit) and Views. (In Drupal 7, by the core module Fields and the contributed module Views.) The Views module, especially, has great power and flexibility that is often missed simply because there is so much it can do. This book helps you make fuller use of Views, on its own and in conjunction with the Panels contributed module, which allows additional power and flexibility when pulling together and displaying content on a page.

I've also made the handouts from my workshops and Drupal Camp sessions on Drupal 6 available online. Listed here are the ones that are still current: